Cone crushers used in material processing can often be broadly categorized as either roller bearing or plain bearing cone crushers (a.k.a. plane bearing cone crushers). Indeed, in the past decades, a typical cone crusher customer might have a strong preference to either roller main shaft bearings or plain main shaft bearings. If a plain main bearing preferring cone crusher customer were to purchase a crushing business with a pre-existing crushing operation utilizing a roller main bearing cone crusher, there often might be a desire to eventually replace a worn out roller main bearing cone crusher with a plain main bearing cone crusher. However, this could, at times, be substantially more difficult and time consuming than merely purchasing a replacement cone crusher of the same make and model. A plain main bearing style of crusher will typically be made by a different manufacturer, because typically, in the past, cone crusher manufactures have made either roller bearing cone crushers or plain bearing cone crushers, but not both. Consequently, plain bearing cones have different exterior configurations and interfaces, e.g. chassis mounting structures and bolts and input and output conveyors etc. than would a roller main bearing style machine; even if the two types of machines have roughly the same size and performance characteristics. Therefore, the replacement of an existing crusher with one having a different style main bearing would typically result in a need to make non-desired and non-trivial site modifications or even less desirable modifications to the new replacement cone crusher.
While prior art cone crushers have enjoyed considerable success in the past, there exists a need for improvement in several respects. The following description of the present invention is intended to address some of these needs.